Grass Widow
by simplyprologue
Summary: "MacKenzie knows that she needs to uproot and leave before she rots where she's planted." 2.06 AU; the Genoa story never goes to air. Now complete.
1. Our Endless, Numbered Days

**A/N: **So this fic goes AU after the time-jump at the end of 2.06 "One Step Too Many." They never get the call from Valenzuela, so Operation Genoa never goes to air and Will is never set on the path to his revelation on Election Night. The story itself takes place Jan/Feb 2013.

Many, many thanks to Pip and Meg for their beta'ing/babysitting/coercion, without which I would not have finished this.

The story — which has three parts — is completed and the next two parts are sitting in my fic folder waiting to be edited. Part II, barring incident, will be posted Saturday and Part III on Monday. The chapter title is taken from the Iron and Wine song, "Passing Afternoon." The title, "grass widow," is a colloquial term for an abandoned mistress with grass stains on her skirts, indicating a romp in the grass rather than a real bed. She's looked upon with a shade of malignancy and has no social or personal security... or so Mac perceives.

* * *

**PART I: OUR ENDLESS, NUMBERED DAYS**

* * *

It takes her three tries to convince Charlie that she means to leave.

Not just _News Night_, not just ACN, but the whole game, sum total. A disquiet has settled in her bones, creaking and lingering, and MacKenzie knows that she needs to uproot and leave before she rots where she's planted. She has a friend at Columbia who has spoken for her with the head of their journalism school, a manuscript she's been sitting on since Islamabad, and a friend who's a book agent, ready to make her niche celebrity.

Charlie splutters, and silently she shrugs, looking down at the whirl of amber liquid in the glass in her hands.

"Three years ago I needed to come home, to feel normal again. Three years before that I needed to be anyone but myself. Three years before _that_… you gave me all the help I've ever needed, Charlie. But you know me." She pauses then, affecting a bare smile. "Three years is the longest contract I've ever signed."

(MacKenzie came home to Will in 2010 because she needed, quite desperately, the person who knew her best from before, as she tried to claw her way back to then. To before.

But there are things Will doesn't know — therapy appointments charted carefully in her planner, a little row of orange prescription bottles in medicine cabinet, two out-patient laparoscopies to break up the adhesions in her abdomen, the carefully-creased list of triggers in the top drawer of her desk — and she is now trying to bury herself in the show, bury herself by desperately trying to become the woman she was before.

MacKenzie is now nearly certain her relationship with Will has been a casualty to that.)

Charlie sighs, and places his glass on his desk blotter. "What do you want to do?"

"Teach some young idealists how to do the news uptown in Morningside Heights." He smiles gently, like a question, and she shrugs. "I spent my entire career as an executive producer as _Will McAvoy's_ executive producer. It would feel wrong, to do another show."

Charlie doesn't say anything, but looks at her sadly. But she won't have it. She's waited three years, patiently and close-by. She has answered his 2 AM phone calls and stayed by his hospital bedside and through all the girlfriends and his father's death. Will is happy, Will is not going to forgive her, and Will is her best friend and the love of her life, but she can no longer live like this.

"This way the staff doesn't feel like they have to choose sides," she offers feebly. "And Will doesn't need me; they can _do the show _without me. Jim is experienced enough. And I'll be close enough that if they need a hand every once in a while—"

He hums thoughtfully. "Do you think Will wants to do the show with anyone but you?"

She has half an answer on her tongue before she reconsiders, exhaling heavily, trying to breathe the weight out of her lungs, smiling crookedly at the concern on Charlie's face.

"Post-traumatic stress disorder is a weed," she murmurs. "And it plants itself at your ankles, and if you stop paying attention, it will grow to up around your neck and choke the life from you." Charlie's mouth parts, and she waves off whatever he is about to say. "I love Will. But this isn't good for either of us, if I stay. If I go… now, like this, with us being… friends, maybe we can finally move on with our lives."

Charlie looks at her like he did six years ago. But she was younger then; more headstrong, less fearful, caged by nothing after she unknowingly unhinged the door by her own revelation. What can she say?

Will can't move past what she did with Brian.

That's plain to her now, and a better person would stay, she knows, forgiveness aside. A better person could accept friendship. A better person could stay on, work with him, settle for what he can give. But she's not better, because loneliness is threatening to swallow her up whole if the anxiety and flashbacks don't asphyxiate her first.

"I have to move on."

Charlie pours them both another drink, and nods.

* * *

By the dint of the three whiskeys she drinks far too quickly after broadcast in Hang Chews, the first person she tells is Don. He gapes at her while she drinks the fourth of the night, sixth of the day.

The last time she left she didn't drink nearly this much.

(That came after.)

Shrugging, she sinks down into the corner couch they've tucked themselves into. "I set out what I came here to do. I turned _News Night _into a ratings sweet spot that informs the electorate and turned Will into the anchor Charlie and I knew he could be. The show can run itself, they don't need me anymore." Don looks at her with a distinctly dumbfounded expression on his face, and she forces herself to say it, self-consciously looking down into her drink. "And I don't want to be an EP anymore."

The look on Don's face suggests that she's just blasphemed against some higher god. "So you've decided to… what? Declare victory and go home?"

"Are you comparing me going to Columbia to the US pulling out of Vietnam?"

"You compared your relationship with Will to slavery," he suggests with a disbelieving laugh.

Wrinkling her nose, she shakes her head. "I said absolutely nothing about the chattel principle," she snarks, before sullenly examining her hands. "Besides, you're happily in a relationship, so shut up."

Now with her thoughts soaked in liquor, she feels even more wretched.

"I had to wait. For Sloan. Almost a year and a half," Don says in an attempt at camaraderie.

What can she say? Not that she's losing her focus, risking slipping into the fog again. Not that she finds herself meandering through days at a time, flitting from story to story. Sitting in her office like a foolish girl sitting in a bed of grass, getting pollen on her skirt while she fists handfuls of green from the dirt and lets them go into the wind.

Not that Will is close enough to touch, and she was foolish enough to wait. Not that there is only so much she is able to hold onto in her bed of grass, and when she stands she will surely be dirty, but there are things she can hold onto, even in flux.

MacKenzie has always loved to teach.

"I left him, for three years," she says, her head heavy. When she stands, she knows she's going to be dismayed at how much she's had to drink. "Because I thought that was the best, for him and myself. And then I came back, and at the time I came back because no one else would hire me, but I thought, I genuinely thought, if it was meant to be he'd love me again."

And now she knows — has known since September, truly, but she thought she could keep going, be better than she is — that he can't.

"I've waited six years," she says with a small smile that Don returns, because he too knows what it's like to make all the wrong choices in love. "I've been _in love_ with Will for eight years, and it's just pathetic. Now." At first it seemed noble, in a way, like she was atoning for her sins. Her smile drops. "Well, I'm sure it has been, for a while. Because clearly he doesn't want me. And it's pathetic because I should be able to handle that, and accept that, but—"

"Well… there comes a point where you have to think about yourself, so… this is good," he gently says, leaning back and wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

"You think?"

It's a comfort to know that there's someone she won't have to convince that she isn't making a mistake. Although now she needs to tell Sloan, because asking Don to keep her leaving a secret, even by omission, from his girlfriend is an unfair thing to ask of him.

He barks a laugh. "I mean, it fucking sucks. This is eight years of your life." Pantomiming with his index finger the idea of a bath toy circling the drain, Don's laugh turns into a sigh. "You really don't want to produce anymore?" he asks, balancing his chin on her crown.

Mac takes a moment to consider her response.

"People said that to me when I embedded. Asked me why… but I wanted to run. Now I just… I'm tired. Of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hour days. And I go home to no one," she answers carefully. "Now at least I can get a dog," she jokes, trying to steer the conversation back towards brevity. "Maybe a big dopey one that I can train well enough to come with me to office hours. I'll still see you guys."

That was the point of Columbia, she explains. She doesn't have to move, doesn't have to leave her life behind. People change careers all the time and keep their friends, or so she's been told.

(But she and Don aren't those people.

They're creatures of proximity — she's always been, ever since she was a child moving with her father from posting to posting all across Eastern Europe, leaving one set of haphazard acquaintances behind for another every few years. She doesn't know how Don was raised, but the two of them were educated away from fully remembering to be considerate of other people's feelings.

But she's going to try. She's changed; sometimes she wonders if that's what Will doesn't like, that she's no longer the woman he loved.

The woman he loved betrayed him, besides.)

Don doesn't ask whether or not she's told Will yet; Don already knows that she hasn't.

"Promise me you'll come visit me when I'm in the control room," he says as the bar begins to quiet.

"Why?"

"To annoy the hell out of Will." He smirks.

Mac doesn't quite know what to make of that. "Only if you and Sloan buy me dinner after," she retorts.

"Of course," he says as if he's offended that she didn't presume that was a part of the package — a seat in the _Right Now _control room, him, and Sloan, and dinner and drinks.

She laughs. "I'll be there every Friday."

* * *

He had wanted to tell Charlie that he met with his agent before coming in to the newsroom today, had the non-compete clause dropped alongside the contractual ability to fire his EP every Friday, to let Mac know when she came in to renegotiate her contract that she should probably leverage the fact that he had that clause to get herself a hefty raise.

Had _told _Charlie that, pushing up his shirt sleeves before dropping into one of the chairs across from Charlie's desk, trying to rub off a patch of foundation cloying indignantly to his jaw.

But Charlie had folded his hands together and said, "Mac won't be needing to renegotiate her contract."

"What?"

"MacKenzie has decided to take a teaching position at Columbia J-School," Charlie had said, nearly aggravated. "I thought she would have told you she was thinking about it — they offered her tenure track. But they'd be idiots not to. She's MacKenzie."

* * *

"You're re-negotiating soon, right?" he asks her during a commercial break the next night, voice controlled, eyes on his cards for the next segment. "You signed when? Early April 2010?"

He hears her sigh into her mic. "One-thirty back, Will."

"'Cause I'm thinking you'll wanna get in on that early," he suggests, glancing up at the camera. Not that there's anything assured that Mac is watching the screens, is probably hovering over someone's shoulder looking at a graphics package.

Her voice has a strange turn to it when she says, "Okay, Will. Can we table this conversation until _after_ the show?"

"Copy."

Will's anger simmers through the D-Block, and by the time he's ripping his earpiece out at the end of the F-block it's silently boiling, and he follows her out through the darkened hallway leading to the studio out into the bullpen.

"What?" she blurts out, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.

Will scoffs, reaching for his BlackBerry. "Were you intending on letting us know you were going to make a run for academia or were you just going to give me two weeks' notice and bail?"

She nearly stops cold, eyes wide with shock, which makes him angrier, somehow. Turning on his heel, he waits for her to start moving again and catch up, and she trails him the rest of his way to his office. Where she promptly stops a few feet inside the doorway, and rocks on her heels.

Rolling his eyes, he crosses back the open door, and shuts it.

"Charlie told me."

Biting her lip, she nods. "I figured. He's — well, he's not the only person, but he's the only person who would tell you."

"So… this is it?" he asks, flippantly gesturing towards her, his phone in his hand.

_Mac came back because she needed to come home — and you needed a kick in the ass_, Charlie had said. _Don't you remember anything I told you three years ago? You've both done extraordinarily well, and I am so proud. But I swear to god, Will, if you don't talk to her about this._

Talk to her about what? Mac came back for herself, and now she's leaving for herself. She has an _agenda_, she always has. Will knows he's lucky to have remained on it for so long, to remain… what was he, originally, in her metaphor? The horse?

Lacing her fingers together, she shrugs. "You didn't want me here, Will—"

"Three years ago!"

"So you want me here… _now_," she challenges.

He shakes his head. It's not about that.

"Because you haven't exactly made it easy, for me to think that," she continues, voice low and oddly tense. If they were still in the middle of the show, he'd think a guest was planning on going off the topics they had agreed upon and she was about to throw the segment for something else. "For me to think that, because repeatedly, Will, you remind me that I've ruined your life very spectacularly, and it makes me think that we can't be friends and frankly, you've gotten lazy since Benghazi—"

"So you're going to _teach_," he says incredulously, realizing his voice is cutting near snide, but not caring enough to stop it. "You're going to leave the show and _teach, _because I've gotten _lazy_."

Disbelief etches into her features, before collapsing into something Will suspects is indecision. Mac purses her lips, quirking one of the corners of her mouth into an ironic grin. "Well, I was looking for a place that didn't have Taliban fighters or Blackwater guards, and Columbia seemed like _it._"

"You're leaving the _show_—"

"I'm leaving you," she snipes, folding her arms under her chest. "Is what you mean. I'm leaving _you_. But I'm not, unless you mean to say that our relationship is entirely professional, because my apartment is going to be the same exact one I've owned for the past nine years."

He rolls his eyes. "I mean I didn't think you'd ever want to teach. I don't know what your angle is here, is what I'm saying."

That's not entirely true — Will _has_ imagined that Mac would retire to teaching, decades from now, after he's left. Actually, what he's doing is entirely nebulous. It used to be that he'd retire and she'd be too young to, so she'd be an associate professor somewhere and they'd have an apartment near campus and a house in the Hamptons and he'd spend his days writing books while she inspired the next generation of newsmen and women.

Now he's not quite certain where he wants to fit — although Mac made that choice _for _him, so it really doesn't matter — but he knows he wants Mac in his control room as long as he's behind the anchor desk.

"It's more that I never imagined I'd want to stop producing."

"_What?_"

Mac shrugs, looking down at her shoes.

"You _what_ — you don't want to produce anymore, is what you're saying?" he asks, slowly. "Why? What happened?"

Eyes baleful, she stares at him for a long moment before exhaling, thoroughly annoyed, and walking out of his office.

* * *

"So that's the political science building, which I'm told was built over hell." Entirely at home, Sloan walks her down a block of West 118th. "Okay, so the bad thing is we're not neighbors. But the good thing is you're going to be across the street from the Starbucks I always stop at on my way to AWM, _and _the Kosher Deli."

Sloan, for one, has taken the news of her new teaching position exceptionally well. Mac suspects it's because Sloan genuinely enjoys having a leg-up on her on _something_. Besides, well, the entirety of economics as a social science.

Sloan waves to a group of young girls who shout back a _Hi Professor Sabbith! _before she drags Mac across the street to the immense Journalism building.

"This is your new home," she says, framing the building with an excitable flurry of hands. "They already like me here, because of the obvious reasons, so I'm sure they'll like you even more."

Together they across the green lawns towards the overbearing brick structure, its shadow quickly coming up to swallow them. Then the stairs, and the front doors, and Mac finds herself in the lobby, wondering if this building too will feel like _home_. The newsroom at _News Night_, if nothing else, has always felt like _hers_. But soon she'll have an office here, even if the classrooms and lecture halls don't have assignations.

Still, she thinks, heels clicking on the parquet tile as she follows Sloan into the correct wing of the building to find her friend's lecture. Still, she spent twenty-six months in the Middle East, and none of that was hers.

"And you're ready to publish," Sloan chatters on. "So, well, some people might hate you for that. And your students, if you make them pay for your book — I'd advise you make copies and hand them out instead, it'll buy you some cool points because you're saving them book costs and printer fees. But Kenzie this is so exciting — Don said you're excited."

Mac thinks Don _probably _oversold that one, to keep Sloan happy.

"It's just something I wrote on reporting from the Green Zone," she says with half a smile, sidestepping any discourse on her level of excitement.

(The decision to leave was not an easy one to make.)

"So…" Sloan starts, smiling coyly now.

Pre-emptively, Mac clutches her purse closer and rolls her eyes.

"You know the Russian."

"Aleksei. Yes, I know Aleksei."

Sloan's smile grows wider. "Just how do you know Aleksei?"

"Sergei Markov was the Russian Ambassador to West Germany at the same time my father was the Charge d'Affaires of the British Embassy in Berlin," she explains, arching an eyebrow at Sloan's seemingly-knowing grin. "Aleksei and I were _children _together. He taught me all the fun words in Russian and I taught him all the fun ones in English. His family had to make a run for America when they made it onto Yuri Andropov's shit list in the eighties."

"Okay, so you were children together, but he just so happens to have grown up _hot_."

Mac emphatically rolls her eyes this time. "He is like a _brother _to me. A very large, very blonde, very attractive brother. Who is married, mind you. With six adorable children."

Sloan takes a brief moment to cross check the lecture hall that Mac wrote down for her — _The Journalist as Historian_, Room 112 — with the door they've arrived to before opening it.

It was coincidence, really, that she ran into Aleksei after she came back to Manhattan in 2010. She'd agreed to be on a panel for Sloan, a collaborative effort between the journalism school and the economics department — which, this time, did not require her to have immense knowledge of actual economics — which he had been foisted onto as the only faculty member able to give a non-Western perspective on the post-Cold War economy.

They'd barely recognized each other, but he had taken a chance and scrounged up one of her business cards and emailed her after, asking if she was the little Ksenia who rode on his back up and down the velveteen carpeted hallways of the French Ambassador's townhome.

The hulking man in question waves to them as they take two seats towards the back, and Sloan makes an offhand comment wondering if Aleksei was the beginning of Mac's propensity for older, blonder, taller men. To which Mac shoots back that the over-under on her "type" is brunette, actually.

It's not a large class, maybe thirty-five students. All a little sloppily dressed, but she figures that's mostly on par with what she can expect for her own staff. Engaged; Mac can tell they've done the reading.

Forty minute in and amidst a debate on coverage of attacks on US Embassies, Aleksei smirks at her. "Now with Benghazi, everyone was initially running with—"

"That it was triggered by _Innocence of Muslims. _Except for ACN," one student, a blonde ponytail wearing a hoodie, begins to finish. "Who were running with a source from the State Department connecting the attacks to an al-Qaeda official calling for revenge for the death of, um—"

Another student, a girl swallowed by a green sweater with thick tortoise-shell glasses, picks up the thread. "Abu Yahya al-Libi, who had been killed in a drone strike in Pakistan three months prior."

Aleksei nods, leaning on his podium. "Good, good. Now I won't look like an ass in front of ACN's _News Night's _executive producer, MacKenzie McHale, who is currently sitting in the back row of our classroom and who produced that probably Peabody award-winning broadcast."

She groans. "They haven't even released the nominees yet."

"But you'll be on it," he scoffs.

It takes a solid minute of goading — most of it for fun, half of it in Russian — to get her down to the lectern, taking questions about why they decided to run with their source and how they decided to discard _Innocence of Muslims _and eventually on her time as an embed, once Aleksei brings up the manuscript of her book, which is sitting on his desk in his home office.

"With syrup stains on it, I'm afraid," he apologizes. "My sticky-fingered children love their adventurous Aunt Ksenia."

It's _fun_.

MacKenzie has fun, turning things around on students and asking them questions and debating with them and watching the lights come on once they figure something out, or watching their faces pinch when they fight with each other. It's endearing, almost, even after three years of watch the senior staff squabble like toddlers after a toy.

And no one asks her about Will.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	2. Choose a Yard to Burn

**A/N:** I'm drunk and happy, and posting early. Thank you to everyone (a lovely **Guest**, **Ellie5192**, **miss ellinor**, **Rachel2016**, **Millie**, and **Amber**) who commented on Part I. Chapter title again thrifted from "Passing Afternoon" by Iron and Wine.

Warnings for allusions to child abuse.

* * *

**PART II: CHOOSE A YARD TO BURN **

* * *

Mac is gone for the morning, getting a tour of Columbia from Sloan. He wonders that since Mac plans on leaving come May — that's her current plan, anyway, he _asked _like Charlie told him to— if she intends to use up all her time off before then.

He doesn't look up when Maggie pushes through the door.

He _does _look up when she stops, leans, and plants her hands onto the top of his desk, face heightened by near-murderous rage.

"Maggie."

"This is subordinate," she starts off with.

"I could have guessed," he deadpans.

"Mac is _leaving_?" She pauses, closes her eyes, and shakes her head. "You're _letting _Mac leave? Do you know how many EPs I stood by you with? Do you?"

Will leans back in his desk chair, reaching for his cigarette lighter. "Nope."

"Eight," she answers shortly. "After a year-long internship and six months as your PA, you had driven off eight EPs. By the virtue of them — as we all later realized — of them not being Mac. You're letting her leave?"

It used to be cute, that the staff would try and meddle with him and Mac. Now it's just gratingly obnoxious.

"Mac has made the decision to leave," he says in a tone that denotes finality. "I have no idea where you heard about that — unless HR is leaking again, or you're one of the precious few that Mac has informed, but I know that's a very short list that you're not on — and I have no idea why you think it's my place to coerce her into staying."

"You are not this dense," she huffs, nostrils flaring.

"Excuse me?"

Maggie crosses her arms, shifting all her weight onto one hip. "Mac — okay, I will not say she's some puppy-eyed girl trotting along at the genius' heels, but like, Christ, we've watched you two for how long now? Do you seriously think her feelings play no part in this?"

"I'm sure how she feels about me is reflected in the fact she no longer wishes to produce my show."

She pushes up off his desk, whirling around to stalk towards the windows.

"No, Will." she says softly, but sternly. "And I — okay, you don't… you don't see her. In the control room."

He snorts, flicking the flint on the lighter again and again, feeling the flame lick against his palm. Some stubborn part of him wants to grab for the pack of cigarettes in the top drawer, but Maggie's been fighting off a cold for a month now. "No, considering that I'm in the studio. It's why I wear the fancy earpiece that the viewers can't see—"

"Just _shut_," she scoffs, tucking her hair behind her ears. Biting her lip, her eyes sweep the glass wall looking into the bullpen before focusing on his desk blotter. "There's a look, that she gets. When you — when you pin a guest to something or don't let up or it's just a really good broadcast, there's a look, and she's looking at you, and you don't look at people like that unless you're in love with them and I've been watching her do it since the BP Oil Spill broadcast."

She pauses then. For effect, he supposes, nodding along with her in the hopes that she'll just finish up her spiel on how love is all you need and get on with what she's supposed to be doing before the 11 o'clock rundown.

"Day _One_, Will," she says with a demonstrable amount of restraint. "And I get it, I do. You two have a history none of us get, that started before Day One." But then her face shutters, shadows of uncertainty etching her eyes and cheeks. He looks up at her, less concerned about appearing nonchalant. "But Will… you and I have a lot in common. I mean, so do Mac and I, we've, you know, fucked up our personal lives pretty bad by choosing the wrong guy — but what I mean is… didn't you wonder, when we did opposition research on you, that we didn't find anything…"

He sits up at that.

"Anything what?"

He saw the findings on what the senior staff found. Of course that was after he had dropped a quarter of a million dollars on a ring he'll never use trying to out-maneuver Mac, so his day had been a little hectic. And by the time the team presented what they found after broadcast, he was a more than a little distracted by the way Mac was trying to tunnel her way out of the newsroom and away from him.

Maggie looks at the ceiling, nervously rocking back and forth on her heels.

"I think you _forget_ that I was your assistant, so I know more about you than anyone else at the show. Except for Mac, of course," she cautiously explains, threading her fingers together before inverting her palms out to face him. "But you and I have a lot in common."

The timidity in her voice makes him refrain from saying anything at all.

"Except I'm the youngest," she continues, gesturing towards herself, eyes still fixed somewhere that is decidedly not his face. "So I didn't realize until I couldn't handle trying to forgive someone who'd fucked me over how badly it affected me, 'cause I always thought my big brother had it worse. But you're a kid, you know, and you're just thinking about getting the hell off the farm, the hell out of the state, to the coast. In a big job, make lots of money, be _someone_, so you don't have to forgive anyone or depend on them. I buried the police reports because I knew I'd find them, and didn't want anyone else to."

He wants to ask who it was. Every fiber in his being wants to ask her who it was, because if Maggie could see it mirrored in him he should have seen it mirrored in her. But he just stares at her, is painfully aware that he is _staring _at her — examining her, truly, from her uncombed blonde hair to her wrinkled black cardigan to her sensible low heels.

But Maggie's already been through too much. It was just October that he and Mac found her in an ER at two in the morning. The one year anniversary of her trip to Uganda had her in a state where she was too anxious to sleep for 72 hours, culminating in falling and dislocating her shoulder after a drunken tumble down the stairs to her fourth floor walk-up.

Mac and Jim had known what to do for that; he was just there to hold her hand while the morphine kicked in. Mac had Maggie through five sessions with a therapist by Election Night.

To her credit, Maggie keeps talking, uncomfortable but largely unfazed. "I'm just saying, Will. She has a look." Shrugging, she smooths any trace of vulnerability into tempered resolve. "I'm in therapy because I ruined my life because I couldn't let Jim help me after I came back from Uganda. Don't let Mac leave."

"She's not leaving because of me," he says, dismissive of the notion. He won't tell Maggie that Mac is leaving because Mac doesn't want to produce anymore — he is not at fault for Mac leaving. This is _her _decision. That much he's still sure of.

(Except he's not. How can he be sure when he didn't even see Mac wanting to leave coming in the first place?

Has he really spent all this time — he thinks back to the first time Maggie did this, when she was still young and afraid — not considering Mac's feelings at all?)

"Oh my god," she sighs impatiently, glaring. "Fine then. But I'm warning you, if you let her leave the staff is going to hang you from the rafters."

With that grave pronouncement she raises her hands in defeat, moving towards the door.

"I don't care," he calls, out of habit more than anything else.

He thinks he hears Maggie mutter "Yes you do" under her breath on her way out.

* * *

"Hey, it's me." He hesitates over what to say next, half-formed syllables catching in his teeth. "I'm… you're right. I haven't made it easy for you the past few months, and you deserved better from me than that." The next part sounds pained, like he's forcing himself to say something he's rehearsed but doesn't want to admit out loud. "I'm kind of a dick for putting that on you, and I'm sorry. I'll try harder. Anyway, I hope you're asleep — but I was meaning to ask you, for the segment on Israel's eugenics policies—"

* * *

Mac's come out onto the balcony after the broadcast to clear her head. It's cold, enough so that her wool coat is just thin enough that she's tempted to go inside, at least until she stands still long enough that she's comfortably numb, watching darkness clamp down onto the city.

The door behind her opens and she swallows an annoyed exhale.

He's been following her all day, over-eager in some strange reversal, to know if she got his voicemail. _The segment on Israel is fine_, she had said, _and I'm still against moving it from the C-block. _A year ago she would have jumped at his non-apology; now she's too exhausted to try to wrap her head around whatever mental acrobatics Will is performing.

Is this punishment? She'll take it, she thinks, whatever is left that he wants to mete out her last few months here.

"Jesus, Mac," he breathes, leaning against the railing, shoving his hands in his pockets. "I know you don't mind the cold, but honestly?"

"You're more than welcome to go back inside," she replies archly when he wraps his scarf more securely around his neck.

She's angry with herself, she thinks. Yesterday morning, standing in front of Aleksei's class — it felt like that's where she is supposed to be standing. And then today Will has been so sweet to her that she's fallen into past tense, and forgot as they bantered and snarked at each other through the show that she's been dedicated to leaving since the holidays.

That this has been coming for months, since the trail on Operation Genoa went cold and any hope of her chasing something completely unentangled from Will disappeared. Has been coming since the frenzy of covering the attacks in Benghazi and the long silent nights after, tensions rising between them with their ratings.

Will's popular again. He doesn't need her. He's made that plain. And that's good — he shouldn't have to need her. It's better that he doesn't. Now she just needs to get out before that kills her.

"Nah." Hands encased in leather gloves, he fumbles out a cigarette and places it between his teeth. With a _snick _of the wheel against the flint Will's face is briefly bathed in golden light before he snaps his lighter closed and slides it back into his coat pocket. "Taking one last look of the view?" he asks, before exhaling between pursed lips.

She watches him take a deep drag off his cigarette and wave the smoke away from her face.

"I'm not leaving until May, thank you," Mac answers, watching the ember at the tip of his cigarette flare in the relative darkness.

Will shrugs, looking away.

Her own irritation flares — reddened and raw, tired and defeated — and she wrenches one of her bare hands out of a pocket and plucks his cigarette from between his fingers and places it in her mouth, inhaling deeply, holding it until it burns.

"And what do you care?" she asks, smoke erupting through her nostrils, ignoring the look of vaguely scandalized shock on his face. "You can drop your non-compete clause now. You were so urgent to ensure that you could make me leave anytime you wanted."

"Whenever _I_ wanted," he shoots back, letting her take another hit off the cigarette — her tangled nerves begin to unknot — before holding out his hand for it back.

"Ah," she breathes, nodding. "Of course."

They pass the cigarette between them, smoking silently, until Will quietly asks how it went at Columbia. MacKenzie shrugs, and finds a way to explain the difference without telling him how sometimes his voice over the phone before bed makes her wake up screaming at night, the taste of sand and gunpowder on her tongue.

After all,_ that_ is still her fault.

* * *

The blunt smell of espresso has always calmed her. Meeting Aleksei a few weeks later for coffee at a campus coffee shop — not a Starbucks, something niche and almost dirtier, a blackboard menu smeared with chalk dust and coarsely-grained woods constructing tables and counters, walls worn to ivory over time — before the 11 o'clock pitch meeting and his 11 o'clock seminar is calming.

Last night she dreamed of soldiers being swallowed by the tall grasses surrounding Baghdad, in the Red Zone. Long green tendrils that curled into her throat and down into her lungs like fine wisps of smoke, until her mouth tasted acrid, like the air following a gunfight or mortar attack. She had awoken trying to kick free from her sheets, fingers scrambling to fight the obstruction in her throat. Tasted bile, and fled to her bathroom.

The only power she has left in her relationship with Will are her painful secrets.

(She needs to leave.)

Aleksei tells her she looks pale, in Russian. She counters that she always has, and he dutifully reminds her over the rim of his cup that he knows her, and he's read her manuscript. They become _those people_, speaking in a foreign language among the pointed stares of native New Yorkers.

"He doesn't know?" he finally asks. "Your anchor."

(Aleksei never bothers to call Will by his name.)

"It's complicated," she breathes, a defense of Will in the back of the throat should she need it. "He doesn't. I didn't want him to know. And now I wonder if I haven't fucked myself over with that."

He nods. "I know what it is like, to live in exile."

"Mine was self-imposed," she retorts facetiously, hearing her voice ring with self-deprecation.

Aleksei laughs warmly, trying to tease her out of her misery. "Like it matters, Ksenia? The heart wants what the heart wants."

"Don't quote saccharine love poetry at me, let alone from a woman who famously died alone." Mac cringes, laughing with him.

"Come to teach with me," he says, reclining back into the richly upholstered chair. "I'll find you a sprightly young research assistant who will last for days in bed. You'll have brains enough for the two of you."

She scoffs, ripping off a corner of her scone and dipping it into her latte. "Or maybe I will die alone in your attic." Humming, her gaze lengthens to the storefront, of students hurriedly walking past. "I feel guilty about leaving him. I think if maybe the last time had not been so… violent, I wouldn't. I had my weekly appointment with my therapist this morning. She says I need to stop being hung up on a mistake I made the better part of a decade ago, no matter how much I love him."

"You are beholden to no one," he says, reaching across the table to fold his fingers around hers, his hand dwarfing her own. "Not to me, not to anyone, especially if loving them hurts you. For whatever reason, even if you feel it is your own fault, _doushenka_." He pauses thoughtfully, patting her hand and letting it go. "But there will always be adjunct positions, if you are not ready to leave."

When she stands, slipping her arms through her coat sleeves to catch a cab to take her downtown for the pitch meeting, she is firm. Aleksei's words having wrested her resolve back into place.

* * *

He's trying to make good on his promise to try harder. Even though he can't see her in the control room, or at every moment of the day, he counts MacKenzie's smiles. They seem to come more often.

"Good show tonight," he says, rounding to her usual seat in Hang Chews. Charlie's already poured a bourbon into him, but he's good for a few more rounds.

"Yup."

Will slides onto the barstool next to her. "Can't do that at Columbia."

He immediately recognizes that remark as a mistake when her shoulders slump, her smile turning sour. But nothing can dim the slightly euphoric feeling pulsing through him right now. He's spoken to Charlie, found the terms of the contract ACN is willing to offer Mac to get her to stay, a 22% raise and $50,000 signing bonus, only eighteen months this time instead of thirty-six. An extension, so to speak, on her leaving.

Signaling to the bartender for his usual, he turns towards her.

"What do you want from me, Will?" she sighs, carefully sipping what he thinks must be her second or third glass of merlot, considering how squinted her eyes are, the purple stains on her lips on the broken skin that she worries between her teeth.

(He knows exactly what she'd taste like if he kissed her now. Bitter from the wine but sweet from her lipstick, lips surprised but pliant.

Shaking his head, he clears the thought.)

"You were the one who made me agree to do this show." Will keeps coming back to that, over and over again, when he thinks this through. _She _was the one who came back. _She _was the one who changed things, made demands. "With _your_ format, and _your_ rules."

"So this is professional, not personal?" she asks, consonants thickened by the alcohol in her bloodstream.

Snorting, he accepts the glass of Jameson from the bartender, throwing most of it back in one go. "With us, it's both. It's always been both."

Even with Brian Fucking Brenner.

"Yeah, well, considering…" she laughs, flickering her eyes towards him for a moment, but doesn't elaborate.

"Considering _what?_"

Pouting into her drink, she takes a few more moments to consider, before sighing again. "You know, I always thought it was plain weird. That you… you were prepared to marry me, you had a ring, and I knew you had it, you know, it's why I fucking_ told you about Brian_, so we'd have _full disclosure_, and you couldn't even read a single one of my emails? Or answer a text?" Biting her lip, she looks at him for a long moment. Hoping for a response, he thinks, but he sure as well won't give her one. "That's not the… just considering, you know, that the newsroom is our _home_, and of course you brought Brian in, to punish me. Into our home. For a voicemail I didn't even _get_. And you couldn't even listen to mine—"

"Don't worry about the voicemail, Mac," he mutters.

Of course she's still on about that, years later. Will wonders briefly if Mac hopes to twist things from him before she goes, twist the knife one more time.

Brian he apologized for. And the ring… he's not even going there. Because if he's learned one thing from Mac's fuck up, it's that he doesn't need to tell her about why and when he actually bought the ring.

"I'm not," she pronounces firmly, before downing the rest of her wine. It looks for a moment like she's deliberating ordering another, but instead rests her fingers over the base of the stem and pushes it away from her. "I'm just… I can't take being punished anymore. If I go to Columbia, if you want to see me, it's outside work. And I know you won't."

For a split-second, he's stunned. "Mac, when in the hell was the last time I punished you?" he asks lowly, leaning forward onto his forearms.

"You're punishing me for leaving," she mumbles, crossing her arms across her body and cupping her elbows in her hands.

"It's your fucking show, Mac!" he almost shouts, catching the rising volume in his voice in time and tamping down on it, clenching his glass in his hand. "And it isn't your _home _if you're leaving it, is it?"

"I left you once, didn't I?" she asks, cocking her head.

The light catches her eyes, and he can see how red they are.

"What the hell does that mean?" he quietly seethes, nerves knotting and twisting in his stomach.

But he never gets his answer.

Jim sidles up next to Mac. "You guys okay here?"

Something like panic settles in when the kid helps Mac down off her barstool. When she fumbles through her purse for her wallet he waves her off, anything to get them out the door quicker. Jim murmurs something about splitting the cab fare home with her.

Hand shaking around a second tumbler of Jameson, Will wonders if Jim knows that Mac is checking out on him.

* * *

It takes him four tries to get the nerve up to leave a message, each time getting more nerve-wracking as he drunkenly swipes through his phone for her contact information, hits "send," and hopes he doesn't wake her this time. "Hey, it's me," he says. "I'm sorry, I'm an ass. I'm sorry I — the word you used was 'impressed,' wasn't it? The last time I… nevermind. I'm an ass. You're right. I've done some pretty dickish things to you since you've come back, and you've only ever wanted to do the show right. So I'm gonna say — when I was in the hospital after the whole 'Greater Fool' fuck up, you threatened to chop me up and reassemble me at the anchor desk. So listen lady, Charlie is gonna offer you a contract, and I don't care if you don't wanna be an EP anymore. You're the best in the business. You — you are my most trusted partner and my closest friend. So just… c'mon, Mac."

* * *

Charlie takes her to Tartine's in Hell's Kitchen for breakfast on Valentine's Day, and offers her the contract that Will rambled about into her the voicemail the night before, and tells her she has until April to sign.

A month gone since she first warned him of her departure, he's less inclined towards subtlety. Which is laughable, Mac thinks, because Charlie is rarely ever disposed towards subtlety, and definitely not with her.

"Have you told him that you love him?" he asks, watching her move Hollandaise sauce around her plate with a forked piece of egg. Hungover, her stomach is hungry but uncooperative.

She shrugs. "Do you think it would make a difference?" Shaking her head, she carefully takes a bite, chews, and swallows. "I mean… do you think he doesn't know? Why else would I have stayed?"

Charlie softly considers her question, eyes sinking into his black coffee. He looks back up at her and indicates his head forward. "Will doesn't have the easiest time understanding why you and I keep him in that chair. You, in particular. And you saw him after his father died."

Swallowing down another forkful of eggs, Mac's gaze lowers to her plate, the hand holding her fork dropping to limply rest against the tabletop. "I wish I had done a lot of things differently."

"Don't we all, kiddo?"

Her eyes go to the wedding ring still on Charlie's hand, even though Nancy left a year ago.

"I wish I was strong enough to stay," she whispers, laying her fork on her plate. Hardly seeing them at all, she looks at the paper hearts plastered to every window. Charlie says nothing, and she smiles in a small way, shaking her head. "But it's not about strength, is it?"

Charlie shrugs. "Do you feel like you'll be able to breathe if you leave?" he asks plainly.

She nods.

"Then that's what it's about." He grins gently, then, and reminds her even more gently that she can always come home.

But still. "Do you ever wonder about if you had stayed? With whoever she was?"

"Every day," Charlie murmurs, before dropping his fork and knife onto the plate, and taking her hand like he did three years ago, when they sat in a DC bistro and he was pleading with her not to throw her life away based on a diagnosis. "But trust me, MacKenzie. I'm not letting you make my mistakes. Will can chase you, if he wants. You've chased him, it's time for the boy to get up off his ass."

Squeezing his fingers, Mac tilts her head thoughtfully, examining Charlie and the gold band still on his finger. "Could you chase her, if you wanted?"

Which "her" she's asking about, she doesn't specify.

He laughs like he has a secret. "You and I are both at ACN for our own reasons, MacKenzie. The only difference between you and me is that I've made the worse mistakes and that I've been waiting longer."

For the first time, MacKenzie feels like she understands why Charlie brought her back.

And now she knows that he'll let her go.

* * *

Jim, who chose to walk her up to her apartment and then was too tired to walk back down, is still face down in her couch when she returns from breakfast with Charlie. The only proof that he's moved at all is the floral arrangement sitting on her dining room table. It would be delightedly ostentatious, if not for the fact that the sender had not chosen the flowers at random, but instead selected her favorites. Peonies, pastel pink and white, with green hydrangea and lilacs.

There's only one man who would pay for early morning delivery on Valentine's Day or for peonies this out of season, and Mac knows that he ordered them when he felt his voicemail was inadequate, still hours from sobriety, and that if she asks about them today he'll brush her off. Especially in the wake of how they spoke last night in Hang Chews — Jim had to rescue her drunk self, for god's sake.

Setting down the small bouquet of pink carnations Charlie had given her, she warily approaches the flowers from Will.

It's too good to be true, she thinks, fingers nimbly tearing open the silver envelope nestled between the blossoms.

_I'm sorry. —W. _

Holding up the card to her face, she sighs unevenly, tracing the soft petal of a peony with the pad of her index finger. And then sets the card on the table, and walks silently to her bathroom.

Shutting the door behind her, not allowing it to make a sound, she begins to cry.

* * *

She knows it's Maggie coming up behind her by the way she walks — for someone so small, Maggie makes quite a bit of noise, always walking very heavily on her heels, flinging herself about in every which direction she's hurtling in. Maggie closes the door to the editing bay behind her and settles down in front of one of the computers and powers it up.

"Will is being… more than his usual Valentine's Scrooge self so I'm going to do some rendering." There's the faint noise of typing, and then Maggie's fingers hesitate over the keys. "Sloan's going to ask you for ten minutes tonight. The Eurozone hasn't shown any growth this quarter, contrary to what most European economists were predicting. And, um, this is the first quarter without growth since they first started tracking it in 199...5, I think. I can get you numbers on that."

"Thank you."

Maggie doesn't say anything after that, and Mac is grateful. Not relieved — Maggie knows her too well for this silence to be coincidental.

Mac knows she shouldn't be hiding in an editing bay, that if she were a person who didn't hide in editing bays that she'd be up in Will's office, asking him just what he meant by his voicemail, asking if he wants her to ignore it because he was drunk, asking him if he wants her to ignore the flowers because he was drunk. Asking him if he wants her to ignore everything, all of it, like he's been ignoring it since September. But MacKenzie is exactly the person who hides in editing bays, even if three years ago she walked tall into Will's office, demanding better from him.

It's taken three years to fall so far, and it's incredible how little she cares.

She doesn't want to face Jim either, who saw her eyes red and swollen this morning. Seeing Jim would mean facing questions about the flowers that she doesn't want to think about, about what they mean in the face of Will's temper and their fight in Hang Chews last night.

But Maggie, who Mac has taken to therapy every week since October.

"Mac? Does this look good?" she asks softly, turning around in her chair.

Exhaling softly, Mac stands and crosses over to where Maggie is working. She replays the segment — or at least this beta version of it — for her. Mac nods; it'll play at the next rundown at four.

There's a silence where neither of them say anything else, and then:

"So you're looking at Columbia?"

Mac sighs, sitting down on the edge of the desk, and crosses her arms. "So that one's finally reached the senior staff?"

"People talk," Maggie says bluntly. "Manhattan's a small place for broadcast journalists."

She nods. Fair.

Maggie looks faintly angry, put-out in a way. Obliquely so. Mac tiredly wonders who Maggie's target is if not herself. The younger woman curls the sleeves of her sweater up over her fingers, and bites her lip. Mac feels a pang of guilt, remembering ushering Maggie, so pale and fragile, out of the ER and into cab and then Will's guest room. How they spent the night on his couch, sitting up and listening for any noise coming from where she was sleeping, any sign of distress.

Of course the staff doesn't have to pick a side, the way she's leaving, it just doesn't necessarily help. And Mac doesn't know how to find the words to reassure Maggie that she won't just be dropping off the face of the planet.

(You can't, really, after helping someone dress in the middle of a bustling emergency room and holding them upright through a cab ride and coaxing them into taking the narcotics the ER doctor prescribed.

And Will, fixing the pillows so Maggie could sleep half-upright, taking her weight on him in the elevator, looking over the top of Maggie's head at her, panicked, _we should have seen this coming, we should have helped her earlier._)

"Anyway — I just. Thank you. For taking a chance on me. I mean, I had been here for eighteen months and Will didn't even know my name or anything, and without you… and not even just professionally. Is what I mean." Maggie's eyes bob up and down, refusing to stay on Mac's face for any protracted length of time. "You're a really good teacher, and I'll miss you. But you're gonna do really well at Columbia, and I'm glad you could find a place that makes you happy."

Sighing again, Mac reaches down and tucks a lock of blonde hair behind Maggie's ear for absolutely no good reason, and smiles.

"You're gonna do just fine without me here, Maggie," she promises. "I mean that."

Three years, Mac wonders.

It's a long time. No wonder she's never stayed anywhere so long.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	3. There Are Times That Walk From You

**A/N: **Aaaaaaand part 3/3. The woman – since a few people asked – that Charlie was referring to in the last chapter was Leona Lansing. I subscribe to the tumblr headcanons about the two of them being in Vietnam together, and Charlie being Reese's biological father, and Charlie and Leona being the failed 1.0 of Will and Mac, since there are so many parallels there.

Thanks to **miss ellinor**, **Ellie 5192**, **Rachel2016**, **sarah**, and **fanficfanuk** for reviewing Part II!

* * *

**PART III: THERE ARE TIMES THAT WALK FROM YOU**

* * *

They had gone back into the AWM building because she had, in the rush and excitement after the end of broadcast, forgotten to turn off her computer. If she hadn't been drunk, she thinks, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. But she had had four glasses of merlot and her computer was left on, so she was going to stagger back across the street, head up to the twenty-fourth floor, check the wires one more time…

Will (after more Jameson than had probably been wise, despite his claimed limitless alcohol tolerance) had offered to go with her.

She can't even remember what they had been talking about, but they had picked Maggie up from the ER not even two weeks before, so that could have been it, but it was probably the about the broadcast, the Benghazi story.

Neal and Gary had found someone who witnessed the attacks, she had an old diplomatic contact who was working a short assignment in the British Embassy, and they were the only station running the terrorist attack angle. The phone conversation they'd had with the White House about their sources afterwards, Will handing Jim a couple hundreds to get the tab started at Hang Chews.

Will called her spectacular twice after they threw out the rundown at 6:30. She can't quite remember how it happened, which might be the worst of it. They were alone in her office, almost obtrusively happy. So light she might take a step and her foot not hit the ground again. She had been prattling on about something, waving her hands about, focused on not tripping over the ground in her four inch heels.

When she looked up he was smiling. A real one, not the nervous kind, or the sardonic little grins she's grown accustomed to from him.

"What?" she had asked.

"Nothing," he had answered, shoving his hands into his pockets.

She kept talking, and rounded her desk towards him. When she looked up again, his hands were no longer in his pockets but framing her face. This kiss comes back to her, over and over again, in detail. His lips, soft against her own; the angle his mouth slanted against hers; his tongue tracing her bottom lip. MacKenzie wishes she could remember how long it was for — seconds, longer probably, she remembers his hands sliding down her shoulders and coming to rest on her waist. Her own resting tentatively on his chest, thumbs stroking his overwashed blue tee shirt.

And then he broke the kiss, blinking at her, a look of alcohol-laced panic rising on his face.

"I'm sorry," he said, pulling away from her. "I shouldn't have done that."

"Yeah," she replied, lips tingling. Shook her head, stepping clumsily backwards, waving it off. "Right. Sorry."

An anxious disquiet grew between them, Mac hastily assembling inadequate reassurances in her head to say aloud to him, and finding them all wanting. Unconsciously he swayed towards the door, and she bit her lip.

"I'll see you tomorrow, then?" she had asked, quickly.

Will tensed. "I — yeah," he said, before rushing out the door.

She had hoped he would have brought it up, in the weeks following. Come to her as the holidays reminded them of their loneliness, but they both spent Thanksgiving and Christmas alone, although she had been corralled into attending Christmas dinner by Aleksei's wife later in the day, where she was called upon to recount embarrassing tales of near diplomatic disasters they had bumbled into as children.

But then on New Year's, late into the morning, she sat on her couch in a cocktail dress. Mentally and physically exhausted, but unable to sleep after Will's staunch avoidance of her at the staff party. Exhaustion had become her norm by then, sleep only ever won with the aid of Ambien and Xanax and even then she woke up tired.

The longer Will's silence got, the more the idea of doing what Aleksei had done — stepping down from the _New York Times _editorial board to stay on as a columnist, teach full-time, dedicate more time to his family — seemed right, seemed fully-formed as something she could do.

She needed to leave.

* * *

"Are you _fucking kidding me?_" Charlie shouts, gripping the arms of his desk chair.

Will splutters, leaning forward in his seat. He didn't come in here to get yelled at; then again, he didn't come in here of his own volition. Charlie had called down and all but demanded his presence. "What do you want me to do? I've asked her to stay."

"Have you?" he asks, tone not quite indicating trust in Will's assertion.

Flippant now, he huffs. "Have I what?"

He knows what he _has _done — apologized, sent her flowers. Which, yes, he understands that because it's Valentine's Day could be interpreted as a romantic gesture, but it's not as if he sent along a box of her favorite chocolates (Godiva extra dark truffles, she used to eat two and put the box away, but he could convince her she could eat a third) or some flowery card (not that he actually ever did _cards_, or Hallmark, mostly he wrote her notes on stationary). Just two words: _I'm sorry. _

They'd both gotten out of hand at Hang Chews, and he expected to come in and Mac would apologize to him, too. Though, he supposes, he can't really _expect _Mac to anything, but somehow in his less-than-sober state last night, picking out her favorite flowers and harassing some poor florist's assistant into getting them to her, not caring if they were out of season…

Why did he think he could trust her to reconsider?

(Mac didn't take the contract Charlie offered her this morning.)

Charlie folds his arms across his chest, the shoulders on his tweed jacket bunching up. "Because I've spoken to MacKenzie, and I think she would have told me if you had asked her to stay."

So maybe he didn't use those words _exactly. _

Will deflects, waving a hand in the space in-between them. "I — well — I pointed out to her that it's hypocritical and selfish of her to leave."

"So you have not, in fact, asked her to stay?" Charlie asks with a stern frown.

"I — no." Uncomfortable at the way Charlie is staring at him — not mad, by any degree, but still imposing and demanding — Will shifts in his seat, but is truly too large of a man to actually move within the confines of the arms of the chair.

"You've attempted to guilt trip her into staying," he says, slow and appraising.

"That seems a bit harsh," Will stammers.

But no less harsh than Mac's been to him. _She started it_, he half wants to respond, his mind bringing up citations of her more unreasonable demands. But his anger tangles down with the fear that mixes in his belly with the look of disappointment on Charlie's face and the imminency of Mac's departure.

Instead, his mind turns him towards the high-pitched strain in her voice that has become all too common these days, almost interchangeable with the deadened tired tone she adopts outside of the control room.

He doesn't understand why she wants to leave — she only sounds like herself when she's in his ear during the show. But Mac says she doesn't want to produce anymore, and it's only convincing him that she's toying with him, or worse.

Charlie looks at him, stunned.

"She has _post-traumatic stress disorder,_" he says incredulously, with emphasis.

Will's mind goes blank.

"What?"

"She — what do you think I was trying to tell you when I hired her?" he gawks. "Do you remember any of what I _told you _when she — okay." Unfolding his arms, Charlie leans forward onto his desk, gesturing to him. "You can still fix this. We still have time. Ask her to stay."

But that's not what Will's mind is clinging to anymore. "Mac has—"

And he missed it?

"I'm honestly _a little _disappointed that you didn't take that away from our conversation — she _changed _Will. People just don't change like—" Charlie stops there, confusion and then creeping realization. Mechanically, Charlie sits back in his chair, his eyes no longer on Will's face. "Mac changed," he continues, voice softer. "Around the holidays. I thought it was just a little seasonal depression; everyone has someone and it's the holidays and she was lonely. But no, she changed."

Terror sits at the bottom of Will's spine. Mac's been avoiding him all day because the last time he was drunk, the last time he reached out to her while he was drunk, was because he kissed her and then _ran out on her. _

"Yeah, I—"

"What?" Charlie asks, snapping his attention back to Will.

"It's nothing." He shouldn't bring this up. It's his and Mac's business.

Charlie arches an eyebrow at him. "William."

"I kissed her," Will confesses, trying to come across as dispassionate, unconcerned. "I kissed Mac. It was stupid." He waves it away. "We were drunk, after the Benghazi broadcast, really, really drunk…" Not that it's an excuse, he thinks, pausing. "I told her it was — well, I didn't tell her anything, but it's been fine—"

"You — are you a fucking idiot?" Charlie yells, scrambling to his feet. "I mean _what the fuck_, Will. You aren't a dumb guy. Do you think Mac's just been taking your bullshit for her health? To clear her conscious?"

Obviously not, Will thinks, curling his shoulders forward.

Charlie tamps down on his voice and narrows his eyes. "She's not fine, Will, any more than you and I are fine. And now she's trying to tunnel her way out here because she's so not fucking fine that apparently she has to leave a career she loves, because it's associated with _you_. Because MacKenzie is in love with you."

He doesn't know how that pronouncement of Charlie's makes him feel.

"Because you two broke up for —I don't even care _why_ anymore — and she self-destructed and went to a _warzone. _Who does that, Will? Is that what a mentally healthy woman does?"

Mac is a runner, he thinks. And then: he is father's son.

But Mac isn't running. One can hardly consider leaving employment at the end of a contract as running.

Mac is moving on, from him.

Charlie folds his lips into a grim line, shaking his head. For a long moment he closes his eyes, as if recalling something. "And then she comes back from that, and her trauma is wrapped up in your break up, and I figure, hey, you're both on the rocks. Let's put these two kids together and see if they can't help each other out."

He seems to say more to himself than to Will specifically, eyes focused on the back of the room. There's a stretch of silence again, before Charlie turns back to him. The angry fire in his eyes has gone out, but emotions weighs heavily on him. Sighing, Charlie leans an elbow on his desk, pointing a solemn finger in Will's direction. "You helped her right out the door, and now _you _are going to spend the rest of your life miserable."

A childish inkling of despair settles in his chest, a feeling of impending disaster wrought by his own reckless conclusions.

"I'm not an idiot—" he stutters, some long-ingrained instinct demanding that he try to deflect the blame off of himself.

"No, I'm pretty sure you aren't," he says forcefully. "Which is why you're going to go downstairs—"

Yes, that he is.

Will stands, brushing non-existent wrinkles out of his pants. "Okay, I need to go do the final rundown."

Charlie's face creases in consternation.

"You can't run from this Will. She's leaving. You need to talk to her," he says, half-cajoling, veering into what Will thinks must be disaster mode.

_It's too late. It's not worth it_, he wants to tell him. He and Mac aren't going to work. It isn't going to work. Even if Charlie is right, and Mac loves him. Mac's moving on, again.

"Will!"

Carding a hand through his hair, he waves at Charlie and skirts out of his office.

* * *

Will barely says a thing during the final rundown, his thoughts unable to settle. He spends the entirety of it looking at Mac, wondering why he let her get away with "everyone's exhausted." Some small corner of his brain tries to justify that he hadn't seen Mac in years, that she seemed fine, at the time. Except that she hadn't — in his office, trying to make her apologies, she was hunched and withdrawn, anxious in a way he'd never seen before, before the BP spill spun her like a top and she was off and whirling and steady once more.

Should he have looked out for Mac?

_You didn't owe her anything._

But that's a miserable way to live life, measuring by how much you owe others and trying to make sure that they owe you.

Miserable.

At the end she picks up her files and slips out of the conference room, and before he can rethink it, he trails after her.

"Why are you really leaving?"

There's a near-imperceptible hitch in her breathing. "Can we not have this conversation here?"

"No, we're going to have this conversation here because you're not answering the question," he quips, rapidly losing any sense of delicacy or care regarding the situation. Mac's leaving him, or the show, or whichever. "I sent you _flowers_," he tacks on as an addendum as they pass through the bullpen, weaving through the desks.

Faintly Will recognizes that the staffers are paying attention to them; Tess, feet away, squeaks quietly at the flowers remark.

"They're beautiful, thank you," Mac mutters, tensing.

"You're avoiding me," he blurts out, reaching for her before jerking his hand back.

She stops anyway, wheeling around. "Do you really want to go there?" she bites back, quietly aggressive. Collecting herself, sadness flashes across her features and she bites her lip. "Let's just get through tonight's show, Will."

"Why are you leaving?" he asks again, sidling up behind her while she tries to sort out her notes.

"Jesus, man, is this what it was like when I pestered you six days a week about the voicemail? Which day is your holy day?" she asks, exasperated.

Will squashes any hint of franticness out of his voice. "That's not — what does Columbia have to offer that the show doesn't?"

He wants to hear her say it, that she's leaving because of him. Because that's what is left, and he's certain of it. Mac has hand-picked and hand-raised their staff into journalists that she's proud of, she's never given a shit about the ratings, and no one's pressuring her from the 44th floor. Mac no longer wants to produce.

It has to be him, Charlie confirmed as much.

Mac sighs, ducking her chin. "That's not quite—"

"Because you walked in here and changed everything and you have _stayed_ through all my grief I've given you," he pauses then and stops walking behind her, blinking quickly, "which yes, I'm sorry for, but you weren't supposed to—"

That was the wrong thing to say. Mac halts fifteen feet from her office and turns heel again, anger clear on her tightened features. "Leave? Are you twelve, Will? Do you get to — to pull my pigtails and push me around on the playground and I'm just supposed to put up with it? I have. I _have _put up with it. But there comes a point where — you bought me _flowers_ Will, and you can't even—"

"Can't even what?" he says, louder now. Clearly she doesn't care about keeping her voice down, half-shouting across the five or so feet that separate them.

"Not _here._"

He needs to hear her say it. And honestly, what in the fuck does it matter? He'll be a part of her history in a few months.

"You're leaving because I kissed you," he spits out, realizing that he's now turned this into a barbed thing, this secret between them.

And when several staffers in the vicinity gasp, he realizes how loudly he just said that. Jim stands at his cubicle with a violent glare on his face — Will immediately recognizes that he definitely deserves whatever ire Jim may be about to visit up on him — but his arm is grabbed by Neal, sitting close by.

But none of that compares to the expression on Mac's face. Cheeks reddening, she slams the stack of files in her arms down onto the nearest desk — Maggie's, who jumps and hastily attempts to keep the mountain of papers from cascading to the floor. Betrayal and indignation is etched into the pinched corners of her eyes, the curl of her upper lip.

He immediately wishes he could take the words and shove them back down his throat.

"I'm leaving," she begins, advancing towards him in clipped, measured steps, "because you haven't told me to stay — you've been — I've had to fight you every step of the way to have this show the way it is and I've done it. I have endured your bullshit antics from your rotating door of women, to your run with the tabloids, to your goddamn non-compete clause, _Nina Howard_ — who tried to ruin our careers before you got into bed with her. I endured you bringing Brian in here, and every stupid cruel thing you've done to punish me. And you know what? I may have hurt you, brutally. I know I did. But never in my life have I done it intentionally, because I love you far more than I know is good for me. _That _is why I am leaving, despite the fact that I love this show, and I love our staff, and I love — I love you."

She stops a foot in front of him, open and vulnerable before crossing her arms in front of her, staring down at her shoes when all he can give her is a stunned expression.

He forces his lips to form her name. "MacKenzie—"

"No — I have dragged you back to this show over and _over_ again," she shouts, face growing even redder. "I have asked you to _stay_, but you couldn't do me the same courte—"

"I dropped the non-compete clause, Mac, I can't fire you anymore—"

But she's right. MacKenzie has asked him to stay in a million different little ways, asks him to stay almost every day. MacKenzie has done everything right, since she came back. Well — she's made her share of mistakes, but she hasn't—

The idea of MacKenzie leaving the show hurts him more than anything else.

And that one's on him. _A lot _of it is on him.

He doesn't want to be miserable. And he definitely doesn't want Mac to be miserable, definitely not because of him.

"You never told me that you _wanted _me to stay!" she says. It sounds more like a cry than a shout, and he expects Jim tap him on the shoulder and land one right on his nose. "Just give me _one_ good reason, then, why I shouldn't leave for Columbia."

Without truly processing what he's doing, Will wraps his arms around MacKenzie's waist, pulls her flush against him, and slants his mouth against hers. ("Holy _shit,_" someone, Neal probably, exclaims.) Mac tenses, hands landing on his chest, but then relaxes against him, exhaling deeply through her nose. Slowly he moves his lips against hers. They're dry — he knows she's been chewing on the bottom one all day — and taste like coffee.

It's over quickly. The hands on his chest push him away and MacKenzie steps out of the circle of his arms, looking as stunned as he feels.

Clumsily, she collects her things off of Maggie's desk, avoiding the gaze of a very speechless Maggie. "You need to… you need to go to hair and make-up. We have the show in forty minutes."

"I—" He attempts to stammer out an explanation, but finds that he has none. Panic settles in, then, as she brushes past him and heads towards god knows where to hide. Turning on his heel he watches her, watches Jim and Neal and Don, who's appeared from somewhere, join her.

Vaguely, he realizes he thought that kissing Mac would solve everything. But he's old enough to know that their problems are far bigger than what a kiss can fix.

* * *

She has no idea how she's going to do the show, but at promptly 7:50 Will, in his suit and tie and fresh out of hair and makeup, sits behind the anchor desk just like he does every other weekday.

And as soon as hair and makeup finishes with touch-ups under the lights, he hooks his earpiece into place and does the mic check, shuffles his notes. As if absolutely nothing out the usual has occurred. He looks as if he's about to run a hand through his hair, but stops himself at the last second, instead pressing his palm against the gleaming top of the anchor desk.

"There's a story—"

"What?" she asks, quizzical. "Will, we have ninety seconds—"

He glances at his watch and pales. "I — okay, fuck that. I — I don't want you to leave."

"Yeah, I guessed," she says, knitting her brows together and very much trying to ignore Don and Jim standing over her shoulders. But she supposes the entire newsroom knows their business, so there's no harm left to be done.

"Sixty seconds," Jim says, leaning forcibly on the on-switch of the mic. Mac snorts, but swats Jim's hand away from the mic.

"I can handle it," she grits out, pointing him to stand back from the panel, before returning her attention to Will's face on the (many) monitor screens.

He looks like he's hesitating over what to say next, briefly consulting his cards on the A-block before deciding that those obviously can't help him with whatever he's decided to do. "I love you, too," Will bursts out with. "I love you, Mac, and I'm never gonna hurt you again. You're right, I should have just asked you to stay, I should have done a million things—"

"Ten seconds, Will," Herb says on her left. "Grovel during the break."

Startled, she looks askance at Herb, who shrugs at her as the opening strains of the _News Night _ intro music plays. Charlie, with an all too-knowing expression on his face, appears in the middle of the A-block over her shoulder.

"Mac?" Will says at the first break.

Her head is spinning. "I'm here, Will. Kind of have to be."

"True love always wins, right?"

"What in the fuck is happening right now?" she asks, sitting down in one of the empty seats, thumb firmly planted on the on-switch of her mic kit.

"I'm sorry — I — I feel like I should keep saying that. I really am. For all the shit, and for not — for not realizing you were struggling, I should have paid more attention, I should have—"

(Mac studiously ignores that there are several transactions going on behind and to the side of her. And in front of her, if what's happening in the bullpen is what it looks like. In her periphery, Maggie seems to be gesturing Will with a hand signal that invariably means "keep going, gimme more.")

"And no matter what you say, no matter if you stay or if you go to Columbia, I'm gonna be in love with you for the rest of my life," he stutters, only stopping once she tells him he has thirty seconds, and that their next guest might give him the runaround, and not to let up on the riders the Republicans have put on RU-486.

_For not realizing you were struggling. _

She wonders what he means about that, before Charlie's hand rests on her shoulder and she looks up at him.

"You didn't."

He shrugs. "I just reminded him of a few key facts."

Something she strongly suspects might be elation starbursts through her limbs, and for the first time in months she doesn't feel like her feet are rooted to the floor by some creeping weed of anxiety.

He knows, and it's terrifying, but Will looks pretty afraid himself. She _could _be angry, and Mac knows that. She could be angry, she could walk out. Or, she could decide to be happy. Decide to be happy, with Will.

"Will?" she asks, gulping down her nerves.

But then she has to be in Will's ear for the phone interview, and then she and Joey have to wrestle with a graphics package that doesn't want to cue properly, and she's elbow deep re-routing around in a potential computer virus in the sound board by the end of the B-block and winds up just telling Will to shut the hell up or they won't come back from commercial break.

"Mac?" he asks nervously at the end of D-block. "You there?"

She huffs a piece of hair away from her face. "No, I decided to quit in the middle of the show."

"I feel like I could do this so much better if I just start over," he says, unfazed by her quip but still stumbling over his words. The contrast between the anchor facade he keeps propping up during the segments and his unscripted apologies keeps getting starker. "I — I — I don't ever want to not be — no. I love you; I'm gonna go back to that. I'm sorry. Again. And I'm gonna be in love with you for the rest of my life, there's no way out of that, that's just a… physical law of the universe. You own me."

"I thought we established that my first show?" she muses, smiling widely. Will's entirely too adorable when he's worked up like this. Behind her, Kendra laughs.

"Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, not just eight to nine," he explains, gesturing wildly with his hands and staring intently into the camera. "I know — trust me, I know love doesn't mean you'll — I'll wait, Mac, I swear—"

And then she tells him ten seconds back _again_, giggling quietly at the helpless expression on his face.

* * *

She barely says anything through the final segments. He knows how absurd he sounds, rambling on to essentially the entire control room and the three cameramen who keep giving him increasingly more pitying looks.

"Mac?" Will asks after Herb clears him and the cameras retreat.

The studio door to his left opens, and she's striding towards him. A very large part of Will expects her to round off and slap him across the face. He stands, continuing rambling his apologies — one has to stick eventually, right? Either that, or he's convinced Mac to hand Charlie a letter of resignation and declare her two weeks' notice as starting immediately.

But instead, with a very intent look on her face (he thinks he knows what Maggie was talking about with "a look"), she grabs his lapels with strong fingers and pulls his mouth down to hers. It takes a moment, euphoria pounding through his bloodstream, but his muscles loosen and his hands slide up her back to sink into her hair.

Someone in the control room lays on the button to his receiver, because he can hear them all cheering. So can Mac, who gives them the middle finger before batting the earpiece to hang down onto his shoulder.

He's entirely disinclined to stop kissing her anytime soon, but she pulls back and smiles up at him.

"I can't do the show without you, you know," he murmurs, desperately hoping his mic has been turned off.

(It hasn't. Faintly they can hear Jim and Don protesting loudly that Mac isn't supposed to give in this easily.)

Smoothing out his collar, she kisses him again, softly. "Oh, I know," she says, but sounds quite unsure.

"Without you, it's not our show," he says quietly, unable to take his eyes off her lips, and lifts a hand to pull the microphone off his tie. "I need you. I know I can't stop you from leaving, and I took long enough to—"

Smiling wide enough that the corners of her eyes crinkle, she shakes her head. "Billy, does it look like I'm going anywhere now?"

* * *

It takes her three tries to convince Will that she means to stay.

Of course, she doesn't blame him that his trust requires multiple assurances, after the month that they've had she needs to hear it multiple times as well. Not that teaching is entirely off the table — the Center for Investigative Journalism, which is the department within the journalism school that wants to hire her, has adjunct positions — an idea that Will supports. She'd only need six or seven hours away from the newsroom a week, in the mornings, for that. They've spoken about a lot of things (her PTSD diagnosis, for example), after tumbling into bed together earlier in the evening. There's a lot yet to be sorted, but she feels, _they _feel… settled.

She shifts onto her stomach, propping her chin up on his chest. One of his hands lifts so he can drift his fingers through her thoroughly mussed hair.

"Will you marry me?" he asks, like one does it every day, still gently combing her hair.

Mac lifts her eyebrows at that, pillowing her chin on the backs of her hands. "You'd better still have that ring."

Will laughs, and tells her to let him up. Sighing, she gives him an inquiring glance before rolling off him and onto her back, tangling her legs in his sheets.

"So is that a yes?" he asks, padding, still naked, to the dresser in his closet.

Mac snorts, grabbing with her toe the sheet from where they managed to push it to the foot of the bed, pulling it up to cover her. "Do you still have the ring?"

"Yes, I still have it," he mutters, and she sits up when he steps back into his bedroom with a Tiffany blue box in his hand. Shaking the black velveteen box out, he tosses the wrapping to land wherever before climbing into bed next to her. "I — I um, took it home the night of Benghazi. Before that it sat in my desk drawer. But I took it home, after I kissed you, and sat on the balcony and stared at it for a good long while. I chickened out—"

_Oh, Will. _

"Honey?" She grabs his chin, forcing him to look at her instead of the very large Tiffany's ring that is going to be sitting on her finger in a few moments. "Stop apologizing. And ask me proper."

He smiles in a way that is endearingly earnest, and plucks the ring from the box to hold it in front of her. "MacKenzie Morgan McHale, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?"

Humming to herself, she pretends to consider it, and giggles when he nips at the corner of her jaw.

"Yes." One of his hands comes to her waist under the sheet, fingers reaching for the place on her ribs until she squirms. "Yes! Yes! I'm saying yes!"

They sit up then, Will first but pulling Mac — who wraps her arms around his shoulders and plants her lips onto his — with him. He nearly loses the ring in the sheets, fumbling blindly for it while trying to lever her mouth open with his tongue. Finding it again, he pulls back.

"You're saying yes," he whispers, lifting her left hand.

She bites her lip and grins. "I'm saying yes."

He slides the ring onto her finger, and they set down new roots.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


End file.
